I kept the house, because the court agreed that I should, and I sold it six months later, because I never wanted Harper to feel afraid in the kitchen where I had once poured her father’s coffee.

We moved to a small town outside Austin, to a yellow house with a crooked porch and a walnut tree out back.

Harper started therapy with a gentle child psychologist named Dr.

Patel, who used puppets and drawing and long afternoons of quiet.

For a while, my daughter slept with the light on.

She flinched whenever a car door closed outside.

Some nights she woke up crying and couldn’t say why, and I would climb into her bed and hold her until morning.